Faculty Book: Joan Richardson

Joan Richardson

Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction
(Cambridge University Press, 2014)

This volume provides a lucid and elegant introduction to America’s defining philosophy. Richardson charts the nineteenth-century origins of pragmatist thought and its development through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the major first- and second-generation figures and how their contributions continue to influence philosophical discourse today. At the same time, she casts pragmatism as the method it was designed to be: a way of making ideas clear, examining beliefs, and breaking old habits and reinforcing new and useful ones in the interest of maintaining healthy communities through ongoing conversation. Through this practice we come to perceive, as William James did, that thinking is as natural as breathing, and that the essential work of pragmatism is to open channels essential to all experience. Joan Richardson is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and English at the Graduate Center.